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Android Eris Speedup

My old droid Eris was running slowly with the stock Android OS, so I wanted to put Cyanogen on it to achieve a performance boost. I found the instructions for doing so slightly confusing, and I have compiled a single tutorial on how to do this, as basic as possible, thanks to the posts by other people on this topic on various sites, and my own experience.

Disclaimer: Before modifying your phone, please make sure that doing so does not violate your contract, corporate IT policy, or any laws. This information is provided only as a reference, and should not be used unless you are allowed to modify your phone’s OS. Also, make sure you understand what is going on — this information is provided without any warranty or guarantees!

Download MyBackup from the Android Market, and install it.

Run MyBackup, select “Backup” and then “Applications” and then “Local (SD Card)”. Select the applications you want to backup the packages for (you may not want to backup everything… installing some new may be better…)

After the Applications backup finishes, click OK and then select “Backup” > “Data” > “Local (SD Card)” again. Select the data you want to backup from the list. If your contacts are all synced to Google, you shouldn’t need to backup stuff like these or your calendars, but it may not be a bad idea to just in case. After the Data backup finishes, click “OK”, and quit MyBackup.

Now you need to gain full access to your phone. Thanks to the developer jcase, Eclips3, and TeamAndIRC’s post. Please read it so you see what they have to say and their license on the program they released. Here is what I needed to do.

After installing, open the program “Eris Rooter”, read the disclaimer, and click “I agree, Root Me.”

Reboot your device (Press power button for a second, then click Shutdown from the menu that appears. Once phone is off, press the power button to turn it back on, and wait for the startup to complete)

Shutdown your phone.

Hold the Volume UP key (and continue holding it), and press the power button to boot into recovery.

From the Recovery menu, move down to “Backup/Restore” and then select “Nand backup” using the trackball click. Click trackball again to confirm… and wait… until it says “Backup complete!”. Press Volume DOWN, and then click on “Reboot system now”.

Connect your phone to your computer via USB. If your phone hasn’t prompted you, go into your notification bar (drag down the bar at the top of your screen) and if you see “Charge only” or “HTC Sync” click on it and change it so that it is “Disk drive”. Your computer should soon mount the phone’s SD card as a drive (mine named it “NO NAME”, but it mounts!)

Drag over the backup files to some directory on your computer, just for extra safe keeping. Techically you don’t need to do this… but why not? I dragged over “rerware” (MyBackup’s creation) and “nandroid” (from the full phone backup).

Get the new ROM that you want from the internet. Here one option is KaosFroyo. I used the latest version that was there, which was version 38. Download the ZIP file to your harddrive, and then drag it over to the phone’s SD card.

Turn off your phone.

Power up your phone in recovery mode (as described above).

Select “Wipe”

Select “Wipe data/factor reset”, and confirm.

Once done, select “Wipe Dalvik-cache”, and confirm. Once done, hit the Volume DOWN button to get to the main menu.

Select “Flash zip from SD card”, and select the ZIP file that you just put on your phone. It will ask you to confirm… and then wait…

When it is done, select “Reboot phone now”

Once your phone is up, you should see an intro configuration screen, etc. Do this.

I suggest reinstalling applications direct from the Android Market instead of restoring from MyBackup. However, if you want data/applications that you saved beforehand using MyBackup, just download this from the Android Market and run it in “Restore” mode.

If anything goes terribly wrong, this is why you made a Nandroid backup, so just boot into recovery mode and do Backup/Restore and then Nand Restore. Hopefully you won’t need that though!